


The Hero's Journey

by thought



Category: Red vs. Blue
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-09-18
Updated: 2015-09-18
Packaged: 2018-04-21 10:10:11
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,805
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4824956
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thought/pseuds/thought
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Tex is chasing shadows. York and Delta can relate.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Hero's Journey

York and Delta see Tex for the first time in two months while York's in line to order coffee. It'll be his sixth coffee since the sun came up, low and yellow through the chemical smog and driving the ice of the long night away with its relentless dull heat. The caffeine is a dependence at this point-- he's been sleeping well enough, tucked up in one of the abandoned warehouses down on the east side of the sprawling mechanical wasteland that is the only city on the colony.

Most of the planet is water-- at least something that contains water in amongst the chemical soup of the runoff pollutants from the industrial giants. There's no colonial government, just UNSC bureaucrats who got on somebody's bad side and a variety of corporate representatives who appear only through vidchat or on early morning shuttles that depart by lunchtime. Suits that look expensive from far away and, in some cases, air filtration masks over their mouths and noses-- stylish enough to avoid the ridiculous but incongruous enough to bring the weight of their disdain to bare on all interactions.

York had slept a long time. The warehouse stands unguarded and unmanned, victim of a merger stalled in red tape and the crash of the outer rim economy. With more and more colonies getting glassed and fewer and fewer UNSC aid missions, the demand for weapons has been crushed under the demand for food and medicine and pre-fab shelters. Crates of armour plating and firing mechanisms line the shelves in perfect rows and stacks, soldiers caught ready for action in financial limbo. York's been sleeping in his armour, still, and solid layers of physical protection afforded by the crates and the familiar mechanical skin combined with occasional assists from the healing unit mean he can sleep soundly for stretches of five or six hours. A luxury.

York's been coming to this coffee shop for the last few days-- it's a dangerous habit, but it's the only place he's found that runs the water through enough purifiers to keep the heavy metal poisoning levels within Delta's acceptable parameters. York's been stealing enough money that he can pay for coffee. He sure as hell doesn't have enough to pay for medical care. The healing unit does what it can, but the name is a misnomer, really, the functionality being designed only with the goal of keeping the body inside the armour capable of combat by any means necessary.

The last time York saw Tex she was running guns for an outer rim group of "Conservative Insurrectionists", half out of her mind as Omega tore, deliberately thoughtless, through her mental barriers, dancing coded violence and rage down neural pathways, corrupting emotion and programming indiscriminately. She'd been dissociating a lot, put a fist through a wall and came close to shooting the guard who came to investigate the noise, spent hours on end refusing to look at York because of the gruesome associations Omega projected into her field of vision. York had been pretty fucked up on painkillers and metaphysical subjectivism, and the three days they spent together in a shitty motel room trying to rebuild a rusted old mountain bike have become somehow framed in his mind as an extended workplace safety video, complete with serious voice over and amateur filming. Never sign up for secret military projects, kids, you might wind up on the floor of the bathroom counting the tiles franticly while your human-appearing-android partner in crime is busy smashing every reflective surface in the hotel room with her fists and laughing more and more hysterically each time she doesn't see bone under the skin of her shredded knuckles. They never did fix the bike. Later, Delta points out that it had no wheels, so York's not actually sure what the fuck they thought they were doing.

He's not expecting her to show up here, of all places. York doesn't even want to be here. And yet there she is, popping up on the city's local network in a flurry of activity as York inches forward in the long coffee line. D's tracking transaction signals constantly, hunting down poor encryption in the larger accounts and skimming fractional amounts of each of the thousands of small transactions going on across the planet. Everything's electronic here, money moving in precisely calculated sums from computer to computer, every expenditure and wage recorded and balanced against off-world accounts and programs which in turn spit out numbers for productivity and production value, cost/benefit analysis that hold the livelihood of each worker on the planet in their dispassionate charts. Eventually the numbers trickle back to the government in invoices and taxes alike, and after that reach even further, dropping weapons or armour or computers into the public's hands and stocks into their portfolios. York can't get a single credit through honest work, not without filling out his soul's weight in paperwork, but he can steal enough money to get by easily enough.

Delta recognizes her immediately. There's something there. Of course there is. Some extra dimension of awareness between them (and Omega, too) that means there are times when York knows things about Tex without consciously realizing it. Impressions, flashes of memory that appear in his head without warning. He's never asked if she's gotten anything from him and D, but it's more out of a sense of denial.

D scrolls information down the left side of his field of vision. It's not good for anything else-- D can stimulate the proper nerves leading to his brain to simulate vision, but the physical mechanisms of the eye itself are far beyond saving, leaving the ever-present blank spot in their awareness whenever they're out of armour. York watches Tex's activity. She's moving fast enough that she's got to be jacked in directly somehow, and the work is both cleaner and sloppier than he'd expect of Omega, so she's obviously connecting directly. D thinks it's interesting she retains the human mannerisms of data access, slow and incomplete like any biological mind trying to cope with the flood of electronic information. York thinks it's interesting that she's connected at all. She knows he networks for hacking purposes, knows he and D are integrated enough that even when York isn't actively working in code he's a passive passenger to Delta's maneuvering and connections. But Tex keeps Omega off the networks as much as she can, though with his wireless transfer capacity being what it is she can't do much. And Tex herself hadn't liked linking up directly. York thinks it has something to do with what happened back during that final fight on the MoI, but he's not gonna ask.

She's pulling security camera footage, mostly. Some personnel records. She's looking for someone, York thinks. Delta is already searching out a common denominator.

We need to talk scrolls down the left side of his vision, overlaying the info D's been displaying with an aggressive black font, and York almost pulls a gun on the pastry case in reaction. Twitchy, he scolds himself. Logical, Delta counters. York frowns. He's not really sure how to reply to her, so he winds up grabbing a map of the city off the free downloadable welcome packet he'd gotten at the shuttle port and tagging a run-down bar. He includes a time in the metadata of the pin, a couple hours before sunset. They get the confirmation of receipt from her end, and then she disappears from the network. York orders the largest coffee on the menu.

The coffee makes him twitchy, but D can compensate enough to bring them closer to alert. York takes a table near the back of the bar-- out of view from the door but not so isolated as to broadcast his desire for privacy. Tex joins him fast enough that she had to have been watching. She looks better than the last time he saw her, which isn't saying much. Her leather jacket is frayed and torn, a soft chocolate brown, and she's wearing coloured contacts that shade her gaze a murky green. The effect softens her enough that even with her cocky, graceful swagger and the frankly embarrassing way she's failing to hide that she's carrying at least two guns she still manages to blend in.

"Can we talk here?" she asks as soon as she's sat down. York wonders if she's planning to pay for his drink.

"Yes," delta says. "Likelihood of surveillance is only 4.32 percent."

Tex pulls a pack of cigarettes out of her jacket. She smokes North's preferred brand, which York could have happily gone his entire life without knowing.

"Can you not?" he says. "This place already makes me feel like I'm taking days off my life every time I breathe."

"Sorry," she says. "Nervous habit."

"Sure," says York flatly.

"Connecticut's alive," Tex says. York takes a measured sip of his drink, sets the glass down deliberately.

"Do you have proof?"

"Bits and pieces. I've seen her in video footage. In the background of recorded video calls."

"You sure it's her?"

"You know we never recovered the armour."

"Yeah," says York. "I remember."

Tex's hand clenches into a fist on the table. "I've seen her."

"You've seen her armour."

"It's pretty fucking unique."

"But not unique enough to base a solid ID on. Besides, even if it is her armour, it doesn't mean it's her inside."

"She's been working for Charon Industries. That's where I've seen her, in their files."

"Which explains why you're here," York says. Delta is trying to get into Charon's production history to see if they've ever manufactured the sort of armpur used in Freelancer. York has always assumed it was ONI3 experimental tech, but Charon was a major arms supplier for the UNSC in the last years of the war (and he makes a note to track the quiet disappearance of the other large contractors around 2540) and knowing The Director's relationship with Charon he wouldn't be entirely surprised to find out they'd been using stolen tech.

Tex nods. "Charon owns 75% of the factories on this planet. And you know what the biggest development coming out of Charon in the last three years has been?"

"Cryogenics," says Delta, because they are in fact capable of using a search engine. York makes the connection immediately.

"Oh no," he says. "Tex."

"Get that fucking look off your face. You can't tell me it doesn't make sense."

"You stabbed Agent Connecticut in the chest," Delta says, aiming for gentle and missing it by a mile.

"She still had her armour. Believe me, Carolina and I got a two hour dressing down because of it. And that asshole dragged her onto his shuttle. His Charon shuttle, right around the time they would've been putting their cryo projects into beta. And then someone in her armour shows up in the background of Charon communications? Seems pretty straight forward."

"So why do you need us, if it's so obvious? Go get her."

Tex glares. "Fishing for compliments isn't attractive. I need to get deeper into Charon, maybe even physically. You've got an applicable set of talents."

"We're flattered. What does Wy think of all this?"

York knows she sees Wyoming more than she sees him. More than he ever imagined a single person could stand him and his knock knock jokes, honestly. Life is a tapestry. He suspects Tex likes being around someone less fucked up than she is, and he's self-aware enough to know that he and delta don't fall anywhere near that category. Also, he's pretty sure Tex and Wyoming are sleeping together. And killing people for money. He is very good about not thinking about either of these facts.

"Wyoming thinks I'm crazy. He also thinks Florida is going to kill us all in our sleep one day, so his opinion is suspect."

York snorts. "Nah, man, that was a pretty common assumption even back in the program. Jesus, you don't actually think they're assigning Florida to recovery, do you?"

"No," says Tex. "I think they assigned him somewhere a little more important."

York doesn't ask. Tex pulls out her datapad. "I've got everything I've found on CT here. I'm keeping it on local only in case somebody notices what I've been doing."

York groans. Reading hard copy still gives him migraines. "Great."

She huffs out a frustrated breath. "You can't tell me you're just gonna abandon your team."

York stares straight ahead, eye focusing on the wall over Tex's shoulder. Somebody's nailed up an old analogue clock, but the hands are still at three-fifteen and the layer of dust suggests they've been that way for a while.

"Carolina," he says. "She went over the cliff, but she had a grappling hook in her kit, standard issue. Maine ripped the AI out of her head, but she could keep going through the worst injuries, more than any of us. And without the AI her ability to focus would've improved at least 22%."

Tex is watching him steadily, flicking an unlit cigarette back and forth in her fingers. Her nails are bitten down short and blunt, and he wonders if they regrow.

York breathes in, breathes out. Does it again. "She would've figured she'd been declared KIA at some point. Realized nobody was coming for her. Easier to let the snow finish what the fall started, save a bullet." York is going to throw up.

Delta cuts in and York is glad to surrender his voice for a minute. "Did you ever read Dr. Church's personnel record? Do you know anything about his family?"

Tex crushes the cigarette in her fist. "No. I think I fucking already know more than I ever wanted to."

York finishes his drink. "Good call. Don't ever, um, do that. Yeah. don't do that, Tex."

"You got a point?"

"My point is I spent the first year after everything waiting to hear that Carolina was alive. I listened to the Freelancer channels, hacked ONI, tracked her bank accounts and the storage unit where she kept her stuff, went to her favourite bar. It almost killed us, the work and the hope both. And all of it predicated on the sort of impossible scenario you see in an action vid."

"This is different, York. I've got proof. I'm not just casting my net out in some sort of survivor's guilt obsession."

"I tried to get her to leave with us," he says. "Fucked it up, and she kicked my ass, but I tried. And every day I think about ways I could've done things differently. I should've showed her proof. Should've gone with a logic-based strategy instead of emotion, shouldn't have called her AI "things" even though we'd calculated good odds that she would be feeling hostility towards them."

Tex is watching him. "You and D are pretty integrated, huh?" she says, and there's something guarded in her eyes that wasn't there before.

"We weren't, back then."

Tex drops the crushed remains of the cigarette. "Church knew what he was doing when he paired you guys."

York shrugs. "You mean Price. And I don't' see what this has to do with Carolina. Or cT."

Tex sits back. "Look, York. It's a really touching story you've got, I'm sure you cry yourself to sleep at night. I'm sorry Carolina's dead, I really fucking am. I saw it happen. We've talked about this. But this is different."

"How?"

"I'm not guilty, for one. She was a traitor, and I'm not convinced Charon was any better than Freelancer. I did what any good soldier should've done with the information I had. And let's not forget she was the one who told those bastards we'd be at the junkyard when they blew it up. If our positions were reversed CT would've shoved that knife into my chest just as fast."

York winces. "Ok, fine. So you don't have a guilt complex. Say I believe you. You're still chasing shadows."

Tex goes inhumanly still. York slides his chair back a few inches. "Prove it," she says after a minute. "Help me find the info I need. Get me deeper into Charon's network, find its subsidiaries and it's undocumented projects and it's connections with ONI. Find me solid proof that there's nothing to find."

York slides down in his chair, rubs his hands over his face. D is leery. Omega's still implanted, then. He makes her dangerous. Unpredictable. But he knows she won't rest until she can be sure. Is intimately familiar with the gnawing hope, tainted and squirming under his rib cage.

"Ok," he says. "We'll help."

Tex tips her chin, a nod of thanks. She doesn't smile. Out of the corner of his eye York catches a brief glimpse of flame red hair. He doesn't turn to look.


End file.
